'Geologists are by force of circumstances interested in scenery; or is it that an interest in scenery often promotes an interest in geology?’—B W Collins, New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics 1965.

This exhibition brought together the work of two men, earth scientist Sir Charles Cotton (1885 – 1970) and artist Colin McCahon (1919 – 1987) in acknowledgement of the role played by C.A. Cotton’s publications in the ideas and work of McCahon.

At the end of the 1930s, McCahon was striving to simplify his representations of the New Zealand landscape. An increasing awareness of the range of practices and styles of abstraction employed by European artists was filtering through to New Zealand. McCahon was one of the first to explore these developments in his own work.

Formal simplification allowed McCahon to assert an increasing orderliness, a sensibility he felt was necessary to seeing the land. A simplicity and harmony is evident in the finished Otago landscapes from 1939 – 1940. To achieve a pictorial representation of his understanding of the land, McCahon manipulated perspective and form to emphasise or summarise landscape features. Pictorial depth was replaced with a modernist attention to material and formal qualities. McCahon took licence with representation of the land, eliminating or shifting and accentuating forms to suit his desired image.

In the search to give his images of the land more solidity and clarity, Geomorphology, the study of the physical features of the Earth/or the arrangement and form of the Earth’s crust, was to provide some answers.

The widespread appreciation of landforms in New Zealand is indelibly linked to Sir Charles Cotton–a man unto himself, shy and retiring, but an exceptional scholar who achieved international recognition during his time at Victoria University of Wellington between 1909 and 1953.

This exhibition was staged concurrently with Towards a Theory of Everything and Grunt Machine: New Zealand Art on Video.